In rainy September, when leaves grow down to the dark,
I put my forehead down to the damp, seaweed-smelling sand.
The time has come. I have put off choosing for years,
perhaps whole lives. The fern has no choice but to live;
for this crime it receives earth, water, and night.
We close the door. “I have no claim on you.”
Dusk comes. “The love I have had with you is enough.”
We know we could live apart from one another.
The sheldrake floats apart from the flock.
The oaktree puts out leaves alone on the lonely hillside.
Men and women before us have accomplished this.
I would see you, and you me, once a year.
We would be two kernels, and not be planted.
We stay in the room, door closed, lights out.
I weep with you without shame and without honor.
All day I loved you in a fever, holding on to the tail of the horse.
I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.
My hands moved over your body, covered with its dress,
burning, rough, an animal’s foot or hand moving over leaves.
The rainstorm retires, clouds open, sunlight
sliding over ocean water a thousand miles from land.
It was among ferns I learned about eternity.
Below your belly there is a curly place.
Through you I learned to love the ferns on that bank,
and the curve the deer’s hoof leaves in sand.
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love the body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
When I come near the red peony flower
I tremble as water does near thunder,
as the well does when the plates of earth move,
or the tree when fifty birds leave at once.
The peony says that we have been given a gift,
and it is not the gift of this world.
Behind the leaves of the peony
there is a world still darker, that feed many.
“Love poems seem to ask for every bit of musicianship we have, because they
can so easily go out of tune. If the poem veers too far toward actual events,
the eternal feeling is lost in the static of our inadequacies; if we confine
the poem only to what we feel, the other person disappears.”
from Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985)
于2004年11月27日搜集整理